President Barack Obama blamed Washington politics for a failure to act on gun violence during somber remarks Thursday about the shootings at a historically black church in Charleston, S.C.

"At some point, we, as a country, will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries," Obama said at the White House, with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., at his side. "It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency. And it is in our power to do something about it. I say that recognizing the politics in this town foreclose a lot of those avenues right now. But it would be wrong for us not to acknowledge it. And at some point it’s going to be important for the American people to come to grips with it, and for us to be able to shift how we think about the issue of gun violence collectively."

His remarks about the Charleston shootings come more than two years after an Obama-backed background check bill was filibustered in the Senate in the wake of the massacre of students in Newtown, Conn.